It somehow feels like everything is owned by a handful of companies… Oh, that company? It was its own thing in the 1980s, but X brought them out. X also brought Y, Z and C. There’s no competition. X owns everything.

This seems absurd. How did the government get to this point? Were there prior frameworks before they decided on this one?

I can’t see any other result than to deter economic activity that uses computers and “the internet”. I feel this is incredibly reactionary. I sympathize if the goal is to capture economic flows that are disproportionate and outwardly foreign. Facebook as an example: it’s a foreign company with a net negative on France. American ‘internet’ companies dominate others because the governments of the past allowed it. Out of sight and out of mind. China’s the only nation that has been doing it correctly. They have domestic equivalents and more. Compare that to the rest: it’s just America rofl stomping everyone and extracting capital.

Hey crypto-investor! I’m letting you know I’m about to print my own crypto from the open-source bitcoin! Buy my alt-coins now! Your profits are about to go to the moon! Buy CON-coin! The only difference between it and bitcoin is hype and branding! Get in before it’s too late! Computers go brrrrrr infinite ponzi-schemes.

It really hasn’t. It’s always been a commercial outfit and it’s been true to that goal: make money. Consumers keep making fantastical stories about a titan of surveillance-capitalism though. It was financed via the CIA and it has been working with the USA’s intelligence-community from day dot. It hasn’t changed. It’s still Google and it will continue being Google.

You’d have to use it and tell us. No one probably uses all of a suite’s features; some users won’t notice a difference whilst others will. If you’re using Google products though… one is made by a titan of surveillance-capitalism and the other is a project with morality. Google works with America’s government to kill and they’re enabling the genocidal Isrealis. In my mind Google and libre-software are diametric opposites. “How does it compare?” in that context makes the question absurd. Using Google software is never ok.

More like a phenomenon. Things come and go though. I don’t play games anymore; I don’t even know what’s popular.

Halo died a long time ago when I was still playing. Halo: Reach felt like the start of its decline.

Computers are literally garbage; there’s so many of them. Get another and use it for 9front. Get another and use if for OpenBSD. These other software projects aren’t immune to AI or whatever this thread is about… video-games are garbage too. Go outside.

AI is a direct result of mass-surveillance. I’ll repost what I wrote to a previous user:

Something you’re not acknowledging is that this technology stems from surveillance-capitalism and the surveillance-state. Google et al were financed to solve the needs of the state. Google search for consumers was a by-product from the state’s need and desire to make sense of their mass-surveillance programs.

Surveillance-capitalism operates under complete deception. Pokemon Go players didn’t know they were collecting data for autonomous-murder-drones.

Solving Google’s Captchas was unpaid labour: you were creating data for Google’s OCR program and now you’re creating data for autonomous cars or whatever their investors want you to toil on next.

The original iteration of reCAPTCHA was criticized for using unpaid work to assist in transcribing efforts.[40]

A 13-month study published in 2023, “Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2,” found that reCAPTCHA provides little security against bots and is primarily a tool to track user data, and has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of unpaid human labor.

Out of all this theft, unpaid labour and intrusive surveillance what does the working class get? Housing costs are increasing. Food costs are increasing. Poverty is increasing. What is AI going to do for us? It’s not building houses. It’s not harvesting crops. It’s not giving the working class any material benefit, but is further degrading living conditions. Enjoy the endless drone of a data-center! Enjoy breathing the fumes of gas-turbines! Enjoy talking to chatbots and never a human!

AI is deployed as a barrier between the working class and businesses. AI is deployed to decrease labour costs. AI is deployed to kill. The fact you can create text, images, videos and audios that mimic reality only means more surveillance on the working class because digital-signals can be faked absolutely and are now suspect by default.

You can’t eat what AI creates–it is completely immaterial, but it is being used to commit genocide. I’m sure that warms the cockles of the hearts in all of us.

I do not think AI use should be condoned.

It’s almost like the software that powers the internet was designed for a different time and is only still used because there’s monied interest in keeping it around. We need GNUnet.

The year is 2026. Computer users are still “fighting” Microsoft. Battered person syndrome.

I don’t know, but probably a lot of things.

I do think these posts are spam, but the correct thing to do is to ignore it; they’re not of interest to me. Sorry.

I do have an inkling of interest in why people post this sort of thing though; why people feel something is wholly theirs when they’re hardly involved in the creation process. There seems to be an innate need to claim ownership of things. This predates AI and it urked me to see people issuing similar statements then. “Look what I made!” statements when they did not make anything, but a vestige of attention that glued other peoples’ work together into a slightly novel thing. The act itself I have no qualms with. It’s the public advertisement that states credit is due when it is not. It’s juvenile behaviour that demands attention.

I do have an interest in people’s behaviour as it appears malicious to me: like 3D-printed things software has lost all value. Actors selling things are malicious because they’re pretending as if it was not 3D-printed and price accordingly. In other words they’re hoping to exploit a buyer’s ignorance of the production reality. What they’re selling is nearly worthless.

(Capitalist-market proponents would argue that value is not grounded in reality. I am an ignorant communist though, perhaps entirely because of this vicious exploitation of ignorance in buyers by sellers. It is not just an exploitation of ignorance, but a celebration of it and a monied-interest in expanding it, which increases celebration of one party and misery on the other! The advertising industry is innately malicious to all that is good.)

I perceive software-projects like these in a very similar vein. It creates software that is malicious in nature and it’s offered maliciously (or ignorantly). I do not want to engage with malicious-actors or confused-actors as they’re benignly malicious.

I’m also beginning to perceive social-media as only the mass-production of advertisement. Malicious actors use social-media as an advertisement vector, which undermines any good that social-media could do. I’m bordering on the pinnacle that would render any social-media to be malicious in all contexts: irredeemable. Abandon it entirely.

What I’d really like is feedback, especially from anyone on a distro I haven’t tested.

The thing is… why? Everyone else can be a prompt-engineer too. This is essentially spam. It’s like going to local markets and stall after stall is 3D printed rubbish. It’s a waste of everyone’s time. These posts are just ads for rubbish.

But at what cost? U_U

But the Americans have the world’s largest prison-population; but the Americans built a country through slavery; but the Americans are bombing children; but the Americans are fighting amongst themselves and the American empire is in death throes; but the Americans are starting another war; but the Americans are backing a genocide; but the Americans are pedophiles. Jeez America, at what cost? But at what cost?

“Has no money.”

You’ve given more away to Facebook. If Facebook hasn’t asked for photo ID it’s because its system is confidant it knows who you really are. Other people will be asked for photo ID when signing up for a Facebook account.

Let’s state plainly: the title is false. I use lemmy; you’re using lemmy; the other commentators are using lemmy.

There’s a concept I’ve been mulling over for a while–and economists probably have a term for it of which I’m ignorant of–that is that free software fails in capitalist market economies. I expect that statement to create a knee-jerk reaction. The truth is free-software is everywhere and as computers become ever more embedded into our economies free-software’s presence will only grow exponentially. It’s often the foundation for computerised economies.

Free-software enthusiasts understand that its become endemic to the economy. However businesses and consumers still ignore it even when it might be prudent to select or fund free-software. To ignore it seems contradictory to a lot of ideals. A capitalist business should use free-software as the monetary cost is zero: it’s a free product. Revolutionary organisations should adopt free-software is it aligns with their ideologies. Yet we know they don’t. These actors are acting irrationally.

Free-software lacks something that is a prerequisite to participate in an economy: capital. It has no money to propagandise itself. To phrase it another way: it has no money to buy ads. Without ads it doesn’t exist to entities who do have capital.

In Australia Reddit brought ad-space inside shopping-centers. Commercial software has revenues from which a portion can be spent on advertising and its through this advertising that growth can occur. The reason why lemmy has a small user-base is because it has no revenue streams. It’s an economic sink.

If we were to imagine that the user-pool was to dramatically increase what would actually occur? I imagine many instances would be overwhelmed with traffic, knocking them offline. For those that remain a lot of traffic would be perceived as spam. There is no revenue stream that’s attached to that user-base. If there was you would–absolutely!–see lemmy’s user-base increase as there would be a profit incentive: more users would equate to more profit. The current reality is that more users equates to more debts.

The market for ‘internet-forums’ has already consolidated into the big-players we know of. Maybe someone could take lemmy’s code and usurp the established vendors. That behaviour is already underway now; it’s why we have a multitude of lemmy instances. Maybe the next titan of ‘internet-communities’ will be running a lemmy stack. Not all operators are hosting lemmy with ideology/charity being at the fore. Some site operators are asking themselves, “how can I monetise this?”

From my perspective the issue isn’t why people don’t use lemmy, it’s why is hosting so expensive? The prerequisites to self-hosting (whether it be for personal use or for an established group or organisation) are costly. One has to pay rent on a DNS, static-IP, hardware and data connections. These prerequisites are commercial in nature and are priced as if every buyer has a revenue stream from which these rents are payed from.

If an individual/group wants independence and decides to self-host they’re taking on these rents that have been priced at commercial rates. Those are the monetary hurdles. There’s an intellectual hurdle too: a group needs to have members that know how to administer and maintain servers. The prerequisites are rather burdensome. It should then not come as a surprise that a group of young people who play video-games with each other elect to have their community on discord, or whatever commercial-entity takes on the economic and intellectual burdens. These commercial entities hide the complex nature of computer systems and the economic relationships that exist. In exchange they’re chasing speculative profits. They have revenue coming in from which they can apportion to advertising and paid programmers. They have the incentives to grow.

In December 2018, Discord announced it had raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners.

Lemmy is reactionary software. It pines for the day’s of webmaster superiority… Where a webmaster ruled a personal fiefdom and brought and sold other fiefdoms. Users should be able to host and maintain servers for themselves and their communities. Economic rents and knowledge-specialisation are high hurdles to overcome. If they are overcome they’ll find a wasteland where users have already been captured by existing market players—not only that! They’ll exist side-by-side commercial vendors that pay to have their software blasted from every ad outlet they can afford. The enthusiast or ideologue has sparse capital to attract new users away from their existing ‘digital-home’ whilst the current players have enormous war-chests and if non-economic forces somehow push new-users towards them (e.g. something ‘viral’) they have insufficient economic resources to accommodate them.

I would advocate for technology like GNUnet, i2p and hyphanet (GNUnet being my personal favorite). Software such as those abolish the major economic-rents that would otherwise be required for the ‘clearnet’. (DNS rents are unjustifiable and I would like to direct readers to the OpenNIC project.) However the intellectual burden is increased.

I would like to take a jab at the idea that Reddit (or whatever third-party is used) takes ownership of a community and their user-generated content. They certainly do, but the community leaders voluntarily gave it up. They also neglected their responsibilities. There’s no reason why users couldn’t have a local-mirror of their community even if it is hosted on a third-party platform. That would negate the reality of a third-party purge and therefore the ‘destruction’ of their community. These communities are irresponsible with irresponsible users. How does one make an irresponsible user responsible? I don’t think it can be done.

That’s not necessarily true. It’s ridiculously easy to find, especially in this example. Simply change your pickup address to the house next door.

Do you think that fools Uber into believing that the user using the same mobile-computer, the same account, the same data-connection and within the same travel patterns is now a completely different person?

No government is going to enforce a universal flat-rate. However that doesn’t prevent what I’m talking about. Uber can give everyone a different flat-rate. How would you know? You wouldn’t. That’s the problem. A friend gets charged a different flat-rate? Ok, now you know, but when the government goes to investigate Uber says, “well the flat-rate had to increase. It’s now XXX.” Again, the imbalance is enormous between the businesses that have the data and any external regulatory body that has to do footwork to get any data.

The same item sells for two different prices at separate stores? “Oh, that store just had a sale.”

The issue is that these are black boxes. No one but the authors of the system know what’s happening. Law prevents Uber from increasing the price on a nearly flat mobile-computer? They didn’t. That’s just the normal price. Who has all the data? Only Uber. No one else. How then can you enforce such laws?